Students scrambling for transfer credits

The Ryerson Students’ Union (RSU) wants to lobby the provinical government to make it easier for students to transfer credits between schools.

“We plan to enhance mobility from institution to institution. Now, a lot of students have issues with transferring and a number of students are bounced around,” said Liana Salvador, vice-president education for the RSU.

Ontario does not have province-wide standards for transferring particular courses between institutions. This makes it difficult for students to know which credits will be transferable.

Corina Ardeleanu, a fourth-year architecture student, was stonewalled by the transfer credit system when she came to Ryerson in 2006.

She transfered here from the University of Toronto’s architecture program, but none of her core architecture classes were transferable to her new degree at Ryerson. Only her two elective courses in the humanities were accepted by Ryerson.

“I had to pay for courses that I pretty much already took,” Ardeleanu said. “There were so many parallels between what I did there and what I’m doing now, they could’ve accepted some of the courses, but they didn’t.”

The Council of Ontario Universities (COU) and the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities are developing a policy to standardize some courses, according to the COU.

Barbara Soutar, assistant registrar, said “all credits can’t transfer even though they look alike because then students won’t be successful in upper- level courses.”

But registrar Keith Alnwick said Ryerson is a provincial leader at awarding college and university credits.”The Ontario government desires other schools to operate at the level of Ryerson.”

“I guess there’s not as much room for improvement here as there is in other schools,” said Alnwick.

Salvador will move the motion to lobby the provinicial government on this issue at the the next board of directors meeting on March 10.